The shortlist for the 2015 British Composer Awards has been announced.  Congratulations again to Kerry Andrew who has been featured in NATURAL LIGHT.  Kerry is on the shortlist for her liturgical work Salve Regina.  The 36 shortlisted works also include two that were written to commemorate the centenary of World War I and reflect on the powerful  images of nature in wartime that persist and symbolise hope.

John Casken's Apollinaire's Bird is an oboe concerto and a meditation on the brutality of war. It is inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire's poem Un Oiseau Chante, written during the first world war, that describes the birdsong heard above the din of combat and the memories that the song evokes in the minds of the soldiers mired in the trenches below.
​
Papaver, by Dai Fujikura, sets words by regular collaborator Harry Ross.  Taking the universal image of poppies as icons of remembrance, and based on Ross’s realisation that normal life, including the continued presence of poppies, goes on around the war cemeteries of France. 

The beechwoods of Zilbeti, in the foothills of the Navarran Pyrenees, have seen their fair share of momentous battles.  It was here that Charlemagne's advance was halted by local Basque fighters in 778. Napoleon's France and Spanish forces saw significant action in 1794, and in 1813 Wellington repelled French relief forces after a series of bloody setbacks.  And the peace of the forest could hardly resist the brutality of the 1930s that afflicted all Spain.

Since 2010 another battle has raged, over the future of the forest itself.  Arrayed on one side, a Grand Coalition of the mining company MAGNA and the Government of Navarra.  On the other, the meagre forces of the tiny village of Zilbeti and their supporters in neighbouring areas, local conservation groups and national NGOs such as SEO-BirdLife Spain.

There is much at stake.  The company believe their exisiting magnesite mine is becoming harder to exploit as reserves dwindle.  To gain access to new sources they proposed to fell 54,390 beech trees, including, as local ecologists documented, 17,306 mature ones, some centuries old.  The forest is  home to 20% of Spain's threatened white-backed woodpeckers, as well as European mink and the elusive Pyrenean desman.  Moreover, it is protected under European law.

Villagers and the local organisation Coordinadora Monte Alduide decided to call for reinforcements.  SEO-BirdLife took up the cause and led a legal fight in the Navarran High Court.  But the most audacious manoeuvre came from the local troops themselves

Then, in a single morning, fifty people wielding organic, biodegradable pigments filled in the design.  They created an extraordinary Guernica de Zilbeti some 25 metres wide by 15 high.  It is an incredible study in inverse perspective:  the nearest and farthest trees are separated by 52 metres, yet the final work, if viewed from the specially contructed viewing platform, created a 2-D effect from a vast 3-D space.SEO-BirdLife's Ramón Elosegui said "Guernica is a symbol of the consequences of oppression, but at the same time a symbol of hope."

This week the High Court gave victory to the forest.

In May 2013 twenty-five conservation organisations published a report into the State of Nature in the UK.  It revealed that nature is in trouble - we are losing wildlife at an alarming rate.  On Tuesday, two and a half years on, the same organisations launched  Response for Nature.  Naturalist and TV presenter Steve Backshall was in London alongside UK Environment Minister, Rory Stewart, while similar launches took place in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff. 

While we wait for the four country governments of the UK to respond, there has already been a spontaneous, unprompted reaction from a seemingly unlikely quarter.  Earlier this year  David Harradine, founder of arts company Fevered Sleep, and I met for a coffee, and he almost casually mentioned that he was working on a new work directly inspired by his reaction to the 2013 report.  

Fevered Sleep invited people from various locations to take a walk with Associate Artist Luke Pell, who recorded the conversations, and turned the words into a poetic landscape.  “It's an attempt to recreate the experience of walking in a real place but in a different form, an on-line form” says David.  The result was An Open Field.

Now one of the twenty-five organisations, the RSPB, and Fevered Sleep have come together.  In its latest podcast, the RSPB invited David and Luke to talk to broadcaster Jane Markham about their own unique and subtly beautiful response for nature.   Click on the button to hear their conversation, and watch the video of Steve Backshall's inspiring presentation.
​

Amost as soon as you enter Tate Britain from Millbank you find yourself within a sound sculpture comprising the songs and calls over over two thousand birds.  Columbian-born, London-based artist Oswaldo Maciá spent five years in the 1990s collecting bird calls from international ornithological archives and audio libraries.  He reworked them into what today we might call a soundscape, scored according to the birds’ pitches.
 
It is an installation that forms part of the Tate’s BP Spotlights, focussing on individual artists or artworks.  There are about a dozen running concurrently, and Maciá’s Something Going on Above My Head (1995-9) is one of the few that have no published close date, so I have no idea for how much longer it is available to experience.
 
It comprises a number of “carefully positioned” speakers that, according to the blurb “fill the space with a mesmerising chorus that the visitor experiences above their head, much in the way that true birdsong is experienced”.  The speakers I saw were spaced regularly in one plane, around the circular ledge that circumscribed the space below a cupola, between the ground floor and first floor.  A hand-out includes the diagram shown here –in which certain birds occupy positions prescribed in the highly standardised layout of a classical orchestra.

​This leads to the first apparent contradiction:  how to create an orchestral layout in a circular space: unless I have misinterpreted the concept.  There is no readily-available information about the previous life of the work, so whether it was originally conceived for a more appropriate space is not clear.  
 
With the birds, you co-inhabit the cupola and its immediate surroundings.  You can hear the sounds above you when at ground level but move to the level above and the sounds are no longer “above your head”.  I could find no information as to how long the piece is before the sequence repeats itself, or indeed whether it comprises a single soundtrack or several overlapping and unequal tracks.  The latter approach could create a piece that repeats every few minutes, days, years, or millennia, but that is not clear, and presumably not important.
 
Unfortunately, nothing about this piece is clear.  Unclarity can, of course, be a virtue in art.  But the programme note makes claims that are difficult to sustain.  The piece is said to illustrate Maciá’s interest in the ambiguity of language.  The title of the work both describes the set-up of the installation and alludes to “daily events that go unnoticed by the majority of people.” The inspiration for the work was a newspaper article that referred in passing to Russian submarines dumping nuclear residues in the Baltic Sea.
 
From there to a carefully orchestrated collage of bird song is quite an abstraction, but fair enough.  But it is not mesmerising.  You either have to listen too carefully to be mesmerised in order to try (and fail, in my case) to detect any sign of orchestration among the overwhelming hubbub of human activity in an appalling acoustic; or you let the sound wash over you, in which case it is as mesmerising as any other background sound in a noisy environment.
 
The orchestral diagram and the possibility of realising it sonically is certainly a nice idea.  The claimed pitch-based link between the species chosen and the instruments they replace is entirely obscure, and the diagram itself contains some oddities such as spelling errors (including the composer’s name!) and incomplete (and one long-obsolete) scientific bird-names. 
 
Piecing together clues, I think the idea is that an artist has taken considerable care to create and present something that you are not supposed to notice, and cannot fully appreciate.  The alternative view is that the Tate bunged some speakers into the least useful of its spaces and Maciá dusted off an old work, neither party caring very much about whether it made any sense.